A New and Better Future: Buro Happold’s Alice Shay on Infrastructure, the Public Realm, and a Commitment to Excellence
By Julia Gamolina
Alice Shay is a city planner and urban designer with over 15 years of experience in New York City and beyond. As part of BuroHappold’s Cities practice, Alice leads strategic planning and Stranded Assets projects including the Reimagine the Canals initiative, Make Way for Lower Manhattan, and the NYC Small Theaters Economic and Cultural Impacts Study.
Before joining BuroHappold, Alice worked with Bloomberg Associates and WXY Architecture + Urban Design where she managed urban design and city strategy projects for cities across the US, Latin America, and Europe. In her interview with Julia, Alice talks about her international experience as well as her focus on infrastructure and adaptive reuse, advising those just starting their careers to be bold and to amplify the stories of others.
JG: How did your interest in cities and urbanism first develop?
AS: I majored in Art Semiotics and Urban Studies in undergrad and there was this influential week in my junior year where the the idea of Gesamtkunstwerk was introduced in my Art Theory class, which means the total work of art. In theatre for example, the idea is that the work is not just the play itself but also the kerfuffle to the curtain, the person coughing in the aisle, the usher moving around, the siren outside – the total work of art is the crescendo of all of these things. At the same time, I was taking this amazing class by Marion Orr called Urban Politics and Policy and was learning about Back of the Yards and the range of sixties to eighties urban activists who were upturning machine politics and setting out a whole new method for governance and agency in the city.
These two sets of ideas were dueling in my head and it was such an “aha!” moment. And I felt the total work of art is the city, and it’s the place, the locus of opportunity for people to craft the livelihoods that they want and need. Cities are more open to all types of culture and lifestyles and that entire, co-created agglomeration is the total work of art and I was like, “I want to work in service of cities.”
I also grew up in Arlington, Virginia, which is part of the original square of D.C. but the corner that returned to Virginia. There are all these riparian corridors that run across the city; in my childhood they had bike lanes that traversed what’s called the Four Mile Run, and you can literally bike from the entire north side to the south side of the city on these corridors that offshoot and have connections to various communities, neighborhoods, and commercial hubs. Arlington was a well-planned, inner-ring suburb to grow up in, and I went into D.C. all the time as a child and young adult – the combination was an dynamic place to have as a model for urban development.
QueensWay Plan, courtesy of WXY and dlandstudio.
NYC Special Initiative for Rebuilding and Resiliency. New Town Creek Flood Barrier, courtesy of WXY.
How did you get your professional start?
One of my formative experiences was working with the Center for Urban Pedagogy. When I came out of undergrad, I thought, “Okay, who does a mix of public art and urban planning?” My time with CUP was fantastic and blew my mind. I worked with CUP when it was, I think, one of the first rounds of internships. Working with Rosten Woo and Damon Rich, I got to do all sorts of insightful projects that applied creative approaches to urban policy and planning. What I really learned from CUP was how you tell a story about a place, who the protagonists are in that story, what milestone steps you are celebrating, and what our collectively imagined futures for a place are and whom do they serve. Working with CUP really cemented my desire to work in this industry.
After undergrad, I moved to London and I was very lucky to work with Lucy Musgrave and Clare Cumberlidge at their firm called General Public Agency. They were doing public realm studies and public art initiatives and I worked on projects for the neighborhood of Aldgate, Croydon Council, and the Commonwealth Institute. What was influential for me is that planning strategy in the UK is very different from the US. In London, there’s no zoning; new projects are approved through a discretionary process with the local councils. Each time a developer goes through that process, they have to say, “Okay, what is my public offer; what is the public contribution I’m making?” And at that time, under Ken Livingstone, and pre-recession, there was this strong sense of entitlement by the public, a sense of agency that new projects had to offer something for public benefit through the development process to not just to get through approvals, but to actually be a place that people would want to go and work in. So, it shifted my perspective – the public realm contributions to the city, as a whole, should be the underlying, core value of every project. So, that was a very inspiring experience. I’ve been lucky to work with a long string of fantastic female bosses and mentors, and Lucy and Clare were the first of that string.
“...the public realm contributions to the city, as a whole, should be the underlying, core value of every project.”
When did you come back to New York?
I moved back to the US and to New York City right when the recession happened. I ended up working as a Design Innovation Facilitator at Capgemini Consulting. They deployed this dynamic methodology created by an architect and Montessori schoolteacher, sort of an early prototype of user-centered design and design thinking. Even though it was a step away from urban planning work, that approach has come through in much of my facilitation and workshop development because it’s focused on ways to give people a space to think differently about a project than they would through status quo idea generation.
You then went to MIT. What did you learn when you focused specifically on urban design and development for your Masters?
MIT was a fantastic place to go to school because everyone was doing completely different things – I was working with people who were involved with UN Habitat, or designing the future of mobility, or who were going to be real estate entrepreneurs, or those who were doing grassroots activism and so figuring out what my place was within it was stimulating because there was no competition; that training was really driven by appreciating how my colleagues were contributing in different ways to engage the city and policy work.
What did you do after MIT?
I moved back to New York and started at WXY, working with Claire Weisz who was an amazing female boss and mentor. Adam Lubinsky is also fantastic.
I love Claire. I interviewed her almost exactly two years ago. She’s Canadian like me, and has been so helpful in so many ways.
She’s such an amazing connector and amplifier. And, the way that she’s framed her firm is so unique. WXY was a dynamic and inspirational place to work. My start date was actually delayed a week due to Hurricane Sandy so when I came on, much of the work I was doing was related to resiliency, including the PlaNYC Special Initiative for Rebuilding Resiliency, which was the first NYC approach for rebuilding and climate change strategies.
I also worked on the QueensWay Plan at WXY, which is an adaptive reuse of an old railway into a linear park. Throughout my career, a common thread has been what we call stranded assets, which is looking at underutilized or decommissioned infrastructure and investigating how it can be adaptively reused for economic development or public realm projects. Currently with Buro Happold we’re looking at the Erie Canal in upstate New York – the system was originally built for commercial shipping; however, today there is none because, of course, our economy functions such that highway containerization is much more efficient than water-based shipping across the country. So, how do we take this infrastructure and not let it lie fallow but look at it as a circular economy and enable it to continue to serve upstate communities into the future. After WXY, I worked at Bloomberg Associates – I was on the Urban Planning team with Amanda Burden.
Richmond Bridge Park, image by Spatial Affairs Bureau.
Rebuild by Design, by Blue Dunes, WXY, and West 8.
That’s awesome – tell me about your time there.
I worked on Amanda’s team principally, but I also worked on the sustainability team with Adam Freed and the municipal integrity team with Rose Gill Hearn, who’s another amazing female boss powerhouse that I’ve had been lucky to work with. She was the Commissioner of the Department of Investigations but at Bloomberg Associates, she builds open data and transparency tools, amongst other initiatives, so I worked with her to create open data dashboards for Paris and Bogota.
At Bloomberg Associates, I worked on new design guidelines for the adaptive reuse of the Los Angeles River and a strategy to create a prototype business improvement district for downtown Rio de Janeiro. Working at Bloomberg was incredible because the organization brought together several titans of the field who had been in the Bloomberg administration and then offered them a platform to collaborate and see how their experiences in NYC could be helpful to cities across the world. After Bloomberg, I had a great conversation with Kate Ascher, and she asked me to join her to work on the Reimagine the Canals effort for the Erie Canal which I described a little bit.
We have something exciting with her and Michelle Young coming up related to infrastructure. Stay tuned.
She is a hundred percent the infrastructure queen. I worked with Kate to run the ideas competition for Reimagine the Canals, which was really a model for ideation and how we use design competitions to share new ideas. I also ran the Canals task force, which laid out a set of recommendations around resiliency and economic development. We presented that to the New York Power Authority leadership and the governor’s team.
“I love working on projects that catalyze this paradigmatic change, but it’s also really, really hard. New challenges always arise, and you just have to be adaptive and iterative.”
What have you worked on at Buro, over the years?
Much of my time at Buro has been spent working on pieces of the larger Reimagine the Canals initiative – the ideas competition, the task force, iconic lighting of historic structures, and overseeing adaptive reuse of infrastructure across the canal system. It is a major cross-disciplinary effort. I’ve also done a series of studies with a colleague, Shayan Lotfi on demonstrating the cultural and economic impact of various cultural sectors in New York. We have studied the small theater sector, so that’s Off and Off-Off Broadway, and we’re currently working on a study to assess the film and television sector. It’s pretty interesting to take the cultural sectors and actually elevate them as drivers of our city’s economy; they are extremely important for jobs, for taxes, for increasing economic revenue.
I would say the conduit across my career, the common thread, is working on projects of adaptive reuse and supporting the reimagining of them – not just implementation but also telling a different story about these large infrastructures and how they contribute to our public realm.
The Reimagine the Canals Erie Canal, in Baldwinsville. Courtesy Buro Happold.
Reimagine the Canals, Erie Canal Lock 13. Courtesy Buro Happold.
The iconic lighting of Reimagine the Canals. Courtesy of OVI and Buro Happold.
With that, where are you in your career today?
I feel very lucky right now. I love the work that I’m doing, I love the team I’m working with, Buro Happold’s Cities team. Our team members are brilliant and they have a broad range of capabilities. The team is very dedicated to making positive change; I’ve had so many critical conversations in this last year about how we can better serve our cities and I just love working with people who are never satisfied with the status quo, always wanting to make our cities even better.
I think another special thing about our team’s approach and something I’ve liked to do in my career is working with organizations and firms at multiple scales. We’re always collaborating with smaller firms, specialist firms, individual practitioners who have new capabilities that allow us to learn together. MWBE firms especially, are usually so much more nimble, agile, and capable of creating new methodologies. And then, I love New York City. I love living in this place and I have a great faith that the city will rebound after COVID. I think that for the people who are still here and are still working on projects here, there’s a lot coming on the horizon. How we deal with our retail corridors, how we deal with our mobility, congestion pricing coming in…it’s the time to pick it up and keep working and it will be incredibly interesting for our industries.
I couldn’t agree more, I think the roaring twenties are going to be a very real thing, especially in New York City. Throughout all of this, what have been the biggest challenges for you, personally and professionally?
I love working on projects that catalyze this paradigmatic change, for example projects where infrastructure has become defunct or cities are shrinking or climate change dramatically shifts our relationship with our waterfronts. But this kind of work is also really, really hard. There are always new challenges arising, and you have to be adaptive and iterative. There’s always so much that you don’t know, like in our post-Sandy work where we were trying to design protective infrastructure and we didn’t even know what the correct flood levels were as they were still being re-evaluated nationally. Working in adaptive reuse and coming into communities that have deep cultural relationships with this infrastructure, of its past use and their dreams for the future, and making sure to spend the time to understand the symbolic importance of this infrastructure in addition to its current and past utility in order to understand what the opportunity is, is really important.
Who are you admiring right now?
I really admire the generation younger than mine and their activism. This year, through protests, through Get Out the Vote, through cultural innovations and new media formats, the generation younger is lowering barriers, setting new paradigms for the way we interact and what our expectations for the future of our world are, and I think practitioners who are mid-career and older can be inspired by that. You can really reimagine the world and feel driven towards a different future.
“...the stories that we tell collectively are the ways that we conjure and cement our imagination of what we can achieve.”
Earlier, you’ve mentioned multiple times the wonderful female bosses that you’ve had and have been mentored by. Tell me more about them.
I’ve almost always worked for female-owned companies – General Public Agency in London with Lucy Musgrave and Clare Cumberlidge, WXY with Claire Weisz. Bloomberg Associates was obviously not woman-owned, but out of eight principals, six of them were women and I worked with Amanda and Rose. Buro Happold is not woman-owned as a majority but I worked for Kate Ascher who created the Cities team.
The tone of the teams throughout my career has been different, and I have rarely felt that my voice wasn’t listened to because of gender on the women-led teams. The women that I have worked for have been titans in their field, and there’s always been an extreme commitment to excellence. My teams and I have been driven towards that because of these incredibly inspirational figures. Each of them really has crafted their own unique approach to the field. I don’t think any of those four organizations driven by these women is doing anything cookie-cutter.
Not doing anything cookie-cutter really resonates with me; we’ve worked hard at Madame Architect to find and profile people who are like that.
I also work with the New York Metro chapter of the APA, the American Planning Association, and we run an initiative once a year on emerging firms – supporting firms that are starting out and that are doing something different. A lot of them are MWBE firms and I feel like being part of this collaboration with small firms and helping to run this initiative and create a platform for newer firms is really powerful. The kind of cross-pollination that comes from an ecosystem of many different types of firms is so good for the industry because you develop new innovations and are more adaptive to specific needs for projects.
I couldn’t agree more, and that’s a fantastic initiative. Finally, and speaking of emerging, what advice do you have for those entering the profession?
I would say be bold, tell your own story, and listen to others’ stories and amplify them. Believe that we can always envision a new and better future for our cities and those within them, and that the stories that we tell collectively are the ways that we conjure and cement our imagination of what we can achieve.